Tuesday, 16 January 2018

Capital Celluloid 2018 - Day 28: Sun Jan 28

First
released in 1972, Death Line (retitled Raw Meat in the States) was
truly ahead of its time in its mixture of grisly thrills, gallows
humour and sharp social commentary. Now, it is rightly heralded as a
British horror classic, and is a favourite of such genre aficionados
as Edgar Wright, Guillermo del Toro and Mark Gatiss. Don’t miss
this rare big-screen outing, presented by Misc. Films in the VAULT’s
suitably shadowy, subterranean setting underneath Waterloo station.

Time Out review:One of the great British horror films, Death Line is a classic example of what Hellraiser director Clive Barker calls 'embracing the monstrous'. The film's basic premise is a gruesome one: following a cave-in during the construction of an underground tunnel in 1892, successive generations of plague-ridden cannibals have survived and developed their own subterranean culture. Forced out of hiding by the death of his wife, the sole surviving cannibal begins abducting passengers from Russell Square tube station. The disgust provoked by the corpse-filled underground world inhabited by the cannibal is offset by the tenderness with which he treats his dying wife, and by the unutterable sadness of his lonely plight. The film's great achievement is in eliciting sympathy for a creature whose residual capacity for human feeling amid such terrible degradation is ultimately more moving than horrifying.Nigel Floyd